Author: Michael Hendricks 2012-01-31 15:06:45
Published on: 2012-01-31T15:06:45+00:00
In an email exchange between Gregory Maxwell and Michael Hendricks, the two discussed the Sybil attack and how it can succeed 1.7% of the time if a client has eight connections to the network. Hendricks pointed out that even in the absence of addressman, someone who can spin up a large multiple of the current nodes as TCP forwarders to a system they control can capture all of a node's outbound connections. Maxwell then clarified his statement, explaining that with the new address manager, the old address database would routinely have 120k addresses but will now only have 20k addresses. Filling the former with 60% evil nodes requires 72,000 evil nodes while the latter requires 12,000. He believes that the new address manager is a valuable improvement that should be included in the next release but cautions that it makes it easier to isolate outbound-only nodes. A single listening node can support 15 non-listening nodes, and the network currently has five non-listening nodes for every listening node. Maxwell thinks that this ratio has stayed quite stable, so there is room to allow more outbound connections in some circumstances.
Updated on: 2023-06-05T02:13:11.001998+00:00